Time is an image of eternity, but it is also a substitute for eternity.
The miser from whom his treasure has been taken. It is frozen past that is taken from him. Past and future, the only riches of man.
Future as void-filler. Sometimes the past plays this role too (I was, I did...). In other cases, misfortune makes the thought of happiness intolerable; it then deprives the unhappy one of his past (nessun maggior dolore...).
The past and the future hinder the salutary effect of misfortune by providing an unlimited field for imaginary elevations. That is why the renunciation of past and future is the first of all renunciations.
The present does not receive finality. Neither does the future, for it is only what will be present. But one does not know this. If one brings to bear on the present the point of that desire in us which corresponds to finality, it pierces through to the eternal.
This is the use of the despair that turns one away from the future.
When one is disappointed by a pleasure one was expecting and which comes, the cause of the disappointment is that one was expecting something from the future. And once it is here, it is the present. The future would have had to be here without ceasing to be the future. An absurdity of which only eternity is the cure.
Time and the cave. To leave the cave, to be detached, consists in no longer orienting oneself toward the future. A mode of purification: to pray to God, not only in secret with regard to men, but thinking that God does not exist. Piety toward the dead: to do everything for what does not exist. The pain of the death of another is that pain of the void, of imbalance. Efforts henceforth without object, thus without reward. If the imagination supplies a substitute, degradation. "Let the dead bury their dead." And one's own death—is it not the same? The object, the reward lie in the future. Deprivation of the future, void, imbalance. That is why "to philosophize is to learn to die." That is why "prayer is like a death." When pain and exhaustion reach the point of producing in the soul the sense of perpetuity, by contemplating this perpetuity with acceptance and love, one is torn away into eternity.